The Amiga CD32 FMV vs PhilipsCDi … my history of MPG1 video (with some Navy stories thrown in).
Hello everybody this is Shane R. Monroe and you are in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is July 28 2021 year on my 13 mile commute to work. Welcome to the show. That’s right. How about a show on the way to work I know I just did one. But you guys keep telling me more shows even shorter shows as long as there’s more of them is what you’re looking for. So listen, I’m willing to do that. Maybe I’ll get a couple of different live participants this type this time in the morning. So I I sort of had a walk down memory lane. One of the I was watching a YouTube video yesterday about the Amiga cd 32 full motion video cartridge. And you guys know I’m a huge personal I’m a huge Commodore fan, huge Amiga fan, big cd 32 fan. And I was fortunate enough way back when, when I had while I still have a cd 32. But back in the day, I had one of the elusive full motion video cards. And I may have told this story before. But I thought you know, I’ll dust off the neurons a little bit and talk about it because I thought it was I thought it was sort of interesting. So this one they had one that was not working. And so they took it apart and found out that it was like covered in flux or something was told it was it was like a hate crime. That’s what I posted to the guy on Twitter, I said that this is like a hate crime to see a piece of history a significant piece of history along with something that is so rare. So rare. As I recall, and I don’t remember where I got this number, this is a long time ago, I got this number and I could be wrong. But the number that I remember, was it they made 13,000 of these. That’s that’s like five digits of Commodore Amiga cd 32 full motion video cartridges. And as far as I know, there’s no homebrew equivalent. There’s no you know, get her make your own FMV cartridge, right? So it’s like, yeah, so we’re, we’re really talking about something that’s, that’s valuable. And so when I so the reason I lost mine, I didn’t lose mine, I sold mine was part of having to file bankruptcy when I got out of the military. This happens a lot more than people realize. Because what happens is, you get out of the military, you’ve had this great steady paycheck for the last 4567 years. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got nothing. And maybe your wife didn’t work. He was a stay at home Navy wife, right? So she doesn’t really have any income coming in you. You come out of the military and you were serving a special job criteria, right? Like, you know, listen, when you get out of the Navy, nobody’s looking for an atmosphere control room guy, right? I’m not going to be able to, you know, look in the classifieds and find somebody who needs an oxygen generator operator, right? You know, listen, if you were in the nuclear power field, you you had a job the second you walked out the door that was one of the benefits of being a nuclear powered individual as a nuclear powered, trained individual was when your time was coming up commercial nuclear power plants were sending you offers. That was one of the big sales points of actually being a nucular train personnel from the Navy. But if you were in a niche job position like mine, now listen, I was a mechanic. I mean, I was I was in Mmm, you know, machinist me. But at the same time, I was very specialty oriented. I worked on atmospheric control equipment. And so nowadays is connected with LinkedIn and everything else the internet and the way it is, it’s probably easier to find related jobs. If you’ve been in the military, and you’ve had some sort of nice job experience, but back then, early 90s Forget about it. You know, I wasn’t trained to do anything in the outside world. Let’s be honest, right? I wasn’t trained to hold a real job. Despite the fact that I you know, I knew maybe maybe I could have gotten something in the in the mechanical field, I don’t know. But you get out. You move. And oddly enough, also something that you don’t hear a lot about is when people are getting out of the military, a lot of divorces happen. So a lot of a lot of couples break up as part of that transitionary period, you know, and I had a lot of things kicking around when, when I, when I left the military, so I had I had everything on top of everything. So not only do I have to relocate back to, you know, a repressed environment, you know, when I say that I’m talking about, you know, when actually being a job repressed environment, you know, it’s an agricultural town. I had, I had, of course, computer background, I had computer skills, which I did manage to parlay into a job, but it was, you know, I was making $19,000 a year and this was in 1995. That’s, that’s not, that’s not good. My wife had to go and work at Joanne’s in order to make ends meet the right fabric store. And she hated it. So yeah, I mean, there was all sorts of nasty things, that that all sorts of nasty things that happened when I got out of the military and as such, I had to file bankruptcy, which nobody likes to admit nobody likes to talk about. But bankruptcy is, you know, bankruptcies there for a reason. And while just like every other system of power we have, it’s often misused, but there are situations that you know, bankruptcy is the only way out, are bullet in your head, one of the two, right. And in some cases, a lot of people after dealing with 10 years of bankruptcy on your credit report, a bullet to the head sounds pretty good. But I survived that. Not a big deal. I mean, it was a big deal. But the point is, I had to liquidate a lot of assets and the things that I had of great value. Were an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster, right, the original Lightwave or the original new tech Video Toaster Lightwave the whole bit a beautiful, beautiful system, the Amiga 4000 I had to sell it and I also I held on to the cd 32 but I did sell the most valuable component of it which was the full motion video cartridge for the cd 32 So let’s talk a little bit about it. I mean, I actually owned one I actually got to see an operation not screwed up covered in flux and looking pink or red or lack of red depending on where they were in that video. But yeah, so it so let’s let’s what the hell wasn’t First of all, I mean, I wonder the you know, I’m I’m operating under the guise that everybody knows what the hell I’m talking about. So the Amiga cd 32 real quick. It was a 32 bit gaming console from Commodore. Essentially, it was an Amiga 1200 with a CD ROM drive on it, put inside of a console case a lot of great games on that machine, despite what certain other youtubers would tell you. But it was a really interesting machine. And it was it had a lot of a lot of Amiga strength behind it. And one of the things that it did have, much like a competitor and contemporary of it at the time was the Philips CDi. Now the Philips CDi had the benefit of like a gajillion dollar marketing campaign. So I I remember specifically turning on the TV after nine o’clock at night, and having Philips CDi infomercials and they don’t even have infomercials anymore so that’s something else I have to explain It’s so weird having a time capsule this shit. infomercials where we’re when companies bought huge blocks of time in the off hours to run like half hour full hours, sometimes two full hours of commercials. I mean a commercial that ran for two hours in length. And you would think who in their right fucking mind would be watching a commercial for two hours. But it worked. I mean, infomercials worked. Now there’s just too many other ways to you know, target your neurons with ads but as Facebook they know but so infomercials, I can turn on the TV any given night of the week and there would be a two hour maybe it wasn’t two hour felt like two hours or two hours Philips CDi compact disc interactive. This was their console from Philips. And they actually licensed out the technology later on to other companies. So you might see a Panasonic CDI. There’s a couple of other vendors. I think that actually a manufacturers that created CDI compatibles I actually think I still have in my shed, not a Philips CDi, but a Panasonic CDI. And essentially, it was like, if I remember right and don’t don’t quote me on this packs here. But it seems to me that the CDI was like a 16 bit. It wasn’t it wasn’t an Amiga cd 32 let’s put it that way it was, it was pretty shitty. It was its sales point was just like sort of a cd 32 was that with CDs, games and education could be greatly enhanced, right? With real voice real audio real video. All this stories, right? Ooh, 700 megabytes of storage. Whoo, you got to remember them back at that time, and Amiga floppy disk, which was the convenience and choice near and around that time. CD wasn’t a big thing. So floppy disks were like 880 megabytes megabytes? Not, I mean, unbelievable. So small, so small. I’m sorry, 880 kilobytes. What am I saying megabytes? Unbelievable. So you’re talking about less than a megabyte on a floppy disk. And on a CD, you get 700 of those? You know, I think there were pictures or there was stuff on these Philip CDI commercials where they showed like 700 discs and then one CD next to it. All of this fits on this, you know, and that sort of thing. So, it was supposed to be this revolution, and it kind of was it just wasn’t a revolution on the Philips CDi or the Amiga cd 32, to be honest with you. But one of the things that really, that caught my eye, being a huge movie buff, which I still am, and I really was at the time, was the fact that there were movies available for the Philips CDi in a format called video CD. I know you’re thinking, are you talking? Are you talking v CD now? videos e now the CD, video CD? Or as you don’t mean? svcd? No, I mean video CD. So listen, there’s probably like 15 different formats of movies that sit on a standard compact disc, V CD was the open source. Everybody could make one, based on MPEG one, right. But VCD was huge format. svcd was the upgraded version of that. All of these, both of those formats, hugely popular in Japan. Now, I think you could still get new movies on those formats today, in 2021. I could be wrong, but I remember seeing some pretty damn new movies in the VCD and svcd format. It was just that popular, not popular here. Of course. Our progression was VHS, DVD blu ray, right. for them. They went you know, they went they had all sorts of different formats, and LaserDisc was in there and all sorts of other stuff, but just not not to the point. So Philips managed to secure paramount. And, like two other companies was a universal. Paramount was the big one. I specifically remember paramount. Phillips managed to snake a couple of big distributors of movies and get them behind their fully proprietary video CD format. And they released a shitload not a shitload a lot of movies in this video CD format, which by the way, was compatible with nothing other than Philips CDi. And in order to use said movie on a Philips CDi, you had to get a full motion video module for the Philips CDi. You see where we’re going with this. Here’s going to show you where you just spend 10 minutes talking about Philips CDi, now you understand. So the Philips CDi was an ungodly amount of money, I can’t remember what it was. And fortunately, they would allow you to make like 500 easy payments of 3995 that was how these infomercials or infomercials work. And of course the full motion video cartridge much like the Amiga version of the set, full motion video cartridge. The cartridge was almost as expensive as the original console itself. But if you know but it came with free movies, you know, you take your pick of five Paramount titles, you know, so it’s like you buy that you buy the cartridge for the Philips CDi. And you get you know, you get $200 worth of movies as part of that thing, so it was very enticing at the time. And I thought wow, that’s movies on disk boy that beats the hell out of out of VHS. Hey now what’s up Justin? Justin is live he’s probably like right behind me on the ice 17 to go into work. So funny. Anyway, so I remember seeing this going dammit. I mean, I want movies on disk. I don’t want to have big bulky VHS is laying around. I want movies on disk. But I’m looking at this going. The rest of the Philips CDi looks like shit, but being able to play movies on disk can be pretty damn cool. But you know I sort of forgot about it. And then of course, the Amiga cd 32 was released and had its full motion video cartridge. I wish I remembered how I got my hands on one, but I do not. At the time, I mean they were probably ready readily available at the time that I bought it. But about two seconds later they weren’t and then they were instantly worth hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. If you happen to have one. Then of course, I found out later, and I think it was because you As some of you may know that I worked with a an Amiga distributor, back in the 90s. And I was actually part of s comms initial. They had a meeting, when Eskom bought the Amiga property, they met with Commodore USA, and there was a big meeting all the big vendors were there. You know, centar the people that made the follow up to the Lightwave or the Video Toaster, they had their own opal board. There was all sorts of everybody was there. Everybody was there new tech was not there, unfortunately, because I was hoping they’d said Kiki stock hammer. Hello, hello. Welcome to New Tech. Some of you are getting what the fuck is he going on about and some of you going oh my god, neuron head. But anyway, so at that point in time, we talked about full motion video for the Amiga 1200 along with the CD module for the Amiga 1200. Neither one of them saw the light of day, but I’m pretty sure that I’m pretty sure that at the at this conference where we talked about how Eskom was going to flush the Amiga down the toilet, they essentially said they only shipped or sold 13,000 units of the full motion video cartridge. So that being said, having one of those was you know, you know, essentially you know the Ark of the Covenant really and after seeing the one that they had on this video, literally if you open up the case you might actually be like opening the Ark of the Covenant I looked at that and wanted to my face wanted to melt off But anyhow, so the Amiga cd 32 release their own Commodore released their own version of the full motion video cartridge, which would allow you to play v CDs and MPEG one video discs right. But But the only other game in town I mean, listen, if you were in Japan great, because I mean, you could walk down the street and vendors would be selling vcds off off of carts or something, you know, but in America, there was no v CDs anywhere so they own play v CDs and blow it out your ass. Who cares? How awesome games send me some games that use the full motion video cartridge. And I wanted to see I wanted to see some gaming going on. Well, in reality, nobody really made use of the full motion video cartridge because nobody had one right there was only 13,000 of these damn things. Nobody had one that were no good. Listen, listen, Amiga games on the Amiga cd 32 didn’t even really use the CD. They literally took floppy disk images, burned them to a disk and made him boot on the CD 32 if you think that they’re gonna add full motion video to an Amiga title to put on CD for the cd 32 Forget about it. So just didn’t exist there wasn’t it? It was an it was neat if you could play movies, but you couldn’t get the movies anywhere. So here’s the thing here is the genius brilliance. Occasionally the Commodore managed to show back in the day Commodore without any permission, licensing or, or care in the frickin world secretly added video CD support to the full motion video cartridge. What does that mean? It means that this Philips, CDI video CD closed video format that only ran on their $5 billion machine, right? All the sudden the cd 32 could watch those movies. And I owned a bunch of them. I had Addams Family Values. I had Star Trek six, in Listen, it was MPEG one. So it was complete shit. But at the time, my God, and it came on to disk, which was even worse, it was like having a laser disc that you had to flip over right to play the backside with the second half of the movie. But it was it was magical at the time, you know? And, and so it’s like, it’s like, it’s so cool. To have been as Gen X I got to tell you, at least so far anyway. And as far as I know, Gen X has been the most exciting period of life because we’ve seen it all we’ve seen we’ve seen technology move multiple times in multiple directions with multiple amazing jumps in technology and being able to take this disk and see Star Trek six, right running on your console, it was just a piece of frickin amazement to me. And again, you know, if you go back and look at it now, you know, it’s MPEG one. It’s, it’s, it’s standard definition, it’s MPEG one. And it’s on to desk so not not that not that great of a deal. But But my point is, it was really neat if you wanted to, if you wanted to bring a friend over, you really wanted to go to some users group meeting, and show off something really, really cool. Everybody wanted you to bring the cd 32 with the full motion video cartridge. There were a few things that did use it that are worth mentioning. Since I’m running out of time here, I’m almost at the office. So when I say no games used it, that’s not completely true. One game, used it and that was cannon fodder. Great game. By the way, no matter if you play it off a floppy CD cd 32. A fantastic game. This is cannon fodder. But on the cannon fodder disc was a FMV track. And you can actually extract it off the disk. If you happen to own the cannon fodder disc, you can use a tool called ISO buster, you can get a free trial. It’s a paid, he’s a paid software, but the trial version will let you do it. And you open up the disk and I believe it’s track one or two should be about 50 megabytes on the disk, you can actually extract it into an MPEG file and watch it or you can just go up on YouTube and find it as well. But sometimes the fun is in the journey, not the destination. So essentially, it was a it was like an intro video that they shot for cannon fodder. It’s got all the developers running around with toy guns and masks in military outfits. Looking like they’re literally having the best fucking time ever. I watched that video 100 million times I swear to god, there’s more. There’s more views of that video in my household than Gangnam Style on YouTube. I swear to God, it’s true. But anyway, so it’s really any video and it’s a it’s a piece of it’s a piece of historical value to a lot of people not because just being I mean cannon fodder was a big game. It was very, very popular. But nobody’s seen this even even the IBM version that came out later that could have probably played back the full motion video. It did not it did not have it’s not have that intro so the Amiga cd 32 version of cannon fodder is probably overall, the best most complete version of it. And you can only see it if you’ve got a full motion video cartridge. Kind of weird, right? But yeah, and so on this video, they were saying that they didn’t know anything else that use the full motion video cartridge. But there were the Commodore demo discs that came out also had FMV tracks on it, if you happen to play them any cd 32 that has a full motion video cartridge. So it’s really sad, I don’t have one anymore. And it kind of it kind of depresses me a little bit. Because that would be something that would be really nice to have around, be able to, you know, give reference to I don’t know, it seems like it’d be kind of cool to still have that but at the time at the time, and this was in 19 $85 when I sold the thing I don’t remember what I paid for it. To be honest. I don’t I don’t believe I bought it retail. I don’t believe I got it full price. So I’m trying to scan into my building here. And I don’t believe that I paid full price for it. But when I sold it, I want to say I sold it for $400 419 $95 which is damn Hey, SEO. Yeah, never been so much fun more, right? That’s such a great bit. That’s a great little, that’s a great little song. And, you know, on the on the on the floppy disk version, or the non cd 32 version of cannon fodder, they would actually show you like stills like black and white stills from the video clip. So you still got to see each of the developers of the game in their costumes, but it was like it was just a still it wasn’t even It was cool. And they played that same song behind it. But I’m telling you as a huge fan of cannon fodder and a huge fan of the IP and everything being able to actually see a video of these guys running around being dorks was just frickin amazing. So, all right, well listen, I’m at work. I am going to get off the show here. I thought it was kind of fun to to see that again. And it sparked a lot of memories and a lot of a lot of side side anecdotes, if you will. Which was you know, listen, sometimes that’s worth everything right being able to go back and, and, and see these things. Great stuff. Great stuff. So hang on a second before I go Let me um so this is the the retro man cave by the way. That’s the thing I say
